Hototogisu
by Frost Deejn
Summary: The Machine provides numbers without determining if they are killers or victims. Sometimes one person is both. Pre-Pilot.


Disclaimer: _Person of Interest _is not mine, much as I wish it were.

Author's note: The hototogisu, or lesser cuckoo, is a Japanese bird popular in poetry thanks to the beauty of its song and the belief that it travels to and from the underworld.

Hototogisu

Hey! Wait a moment,  
Mountain cuckoo!  
I have a message for you:  
For me, this world of men  
Is a grievous place to be.

~Mikuni no Machi, Kokinshu 152

The man sitting at a computer didn't draw any second glances from the few other patrons at that late hour in a run-down public library in New York City.

What he was doing at the moment was research on poisons: which ones were easiest to get, hardest to detect, fastest acting. He didn't care much about which were most or least painful.

Nor did he give a moment of thought to the security camera in the corner of the library. There was no possible way he could have known a computer program had been designed and implemented that was capable of matching the search terms he was typing in with the face on the video and putting two and two together.

Is my mind elsewhere  
Or has it simply not sung?  
Hototogisu

~Ihara Siakaku, trans. Donald Keene

Harold had always hated business meetings. He was hard pressed to imagine a more pointless waste of time for all involved. There was, as far as he could tell, nothing that could be accomplished in business meetings that couldn't be more efficiently done through email communications.

Nathan had been good at this kind of thing. Meeting people, flattering people, smiling politely. It had come naturally to him. That's one reason they'd made such a great team.

There had been several very important people at the table, and after several hours a deal was struck that increased the net worth of the company by millions, but Harold hadn't cared. He'd just wanted to get home. To his computer.

It had been a relief when it was finally over. He'd left quickly, declining the opportunity for a celebratory round of drinks with the other executives.

The moment he entered his library, he went straight to his computer.

Since the death of his partner, this was the way he preferred to interact with the world. His computer gave him access to a network that stretched across the country, picked up every electronic communication, every public security camera. It could follow anyone. It followed everyone.

Harold was good with computers. He understood them. He knew them inside and out, and could make them do almost anything for him.

He wasn't good with people. People confounded him. He didn't understand, for example, why they wanted to kill each other.

He missed his partner. He missed Nathan Ingram every day, so much it hurt.

He'd never told Nathan how he really felt about him. He still wasn't sure if he regretted that.

There was a new number today. A new number of someone someone else was planning to kill. Or who was planning to kill someone else.

He had known Nathan was in danger. He hadn't done enough to protect him. That's what haunted him.

Ever since Nathan's death, Harold had been trying to save as many of the numbers on the so-called irrelevant list the Machine sent him as he could. It had become his life. He could spare other people the pain he'd experienced, and he was obsessed with that possibility. Everything else—the board meetings, investments, managing businesses, even eating and sleeping—had become like a dream, a blur, like sleepwalking. The numbers, images, files, and data on the computer were all that felt real. He lived in the Machine.

Today's number belonged to a man named Joshua Basil.

Harold pulled up everything he could on Basil. He'd been born in California in 1968, had moved around frequently as a child. His father was Air Force. In school he'd done well academically, and even better athletically. He'd been the star quarterback of his high school football team, and had gotten to college on a football scholarship. His father died while he was in college, and his mother a few years later, in 1992.

His last driver's license revealed a tall, handsome young man with dark brown hair, sharply chiseled features, and striking eyes.

Joshua Basil disappeared in 1995.

And yet the machine said he was alive, in New York, and about to be involved in something unfortunate.

The way the Machine worked was by connecting Social Security Numbers with names, addresses, work histories, bank records, car registrations, purchases, and biometric data, thus being able to follow someone from birth to death, even across name changes, address changes, and job changes. Even if someone had cosmetic surgery to change their appearance, as long as there was a single thread connecting them to their old life, the Machine would track it.

But the Machine didn't reveal how it knew what it knew.

His fingers flashed across the keyboard as he tried to learn everything he could about this latest number.

Harold had limitations. His first course of action when a new number came up was to gather as much information as he could and send anonymous tips to the police. In cases when there wasn't enough information to go on, Harold would hack into computers, either sabotage the efforts to kill, or try to warn the intended victim. He had purchased several properties he could use as safe houses. On occasion he would hire people to try to stop the impending crime. That was complicated. He couldn't trust anyone with the truth about the Machine, so he had to come up with convincing lies about how he knew what he knew, and why exactly he cared. His injuries prevented him from intervening personally in most cases. He knew he couldn't save everyone, and didn't try, instead employing a kind of triage system, determining on a case-by-case basis whether it was worth intervening.

Nothing was coming up on the new number. Joshua Basil had disappeared as if he'd never existed. But if someone was planning on killing him, that meant someone else might also be looking for him. Harold quickly modified a search program to scour all major search engines and databases for the name Joshua Basil.

A few hours later, he got a hit. Someone had searched for the name from an IP address registered to a computer at a public library. The same search session had included several other names: Matthew Peterson, John Ernest Simms, Adam Jonson, Jonathan Horace, Ivan Clinton, and lastly John Reese, but he'd spent the most time on Joshua Basil. The most recent result of the name was from his college graduating class.

Interestingly, the same log-in session as these name searches had included extensive research on poisons, hanging, physical damage from falling, and various state laws on harvesting organs from unidentified bodies.

Harold ran searches on each individual name that came up. It didn't take him long for photographs to come back associated with them. Each name had been created, backgrounds created, as false identities for a single CIA agent. Photographs confirmed it was the same Joshua Basil.

Harold dug some more. A bank account had been created years before using the fake I.D.s for Ivan Clinton in Atlanta, Georgia. The debit card from it had recently been used at a liquor store in Brooklyn. He managed to hack into the security system for the liquor store and matched the time stamp from the purchase to an image on the security camera.

He clicked back and forth between the handsome man in the driver's license photo and the hopeless wreck buying a flask of vodka with the last few dollars in his checking account plus a handful of loose change. The eyes were clearly visible in both images. The eyes of the homeless man were faded and haunted, but they were the same eyes.

Harold considered the searches made from the library computer. The websites brought up as a result of the name searches. It was the desperate search of a man trying to find himself, seeking any positive impact he'd had on anyone's life through any of his many identities, then—finding none—giving up and searching for a way to end it.

It was very late, and he turned off his computer. Joshua Basil was both victim and killer: the Machine had found another person planning suicide.

Harold didn't waste his limited time and resources on the suicidal.

He let Joshua Basil sink from his mind.

Somewhere beyond the library's dark windows, thunder rumbled.

In this endless rain  
You make the very sky resound,  
Cuckoo.  
What regrets have you,  
To cry so all night long?

~Ki no Tsurayuki, Kokinshu 160

A tattered, hunched human form moved like a shadow unsteadily through the night streets of New York City. He had nowhere to go, and no reason to keep moving other than it helped him ignore the rain, ignore the pain. The streets were empty. Like his life was empty.

He did have one place to go. One place everyone had to go. Down. Down even lower than he already was, to where there was nowhere to go anymore. One place where not even the emptiness could reach him.

He thought about it as he walked across a bridge. Some cars drove by. He was splashed with a mist of muddy water with each tire that sped past. None slowed. None cared. Bad things happened to people every day, no one tried to stop it. They were all too busy chasing their own ends. Everyone thought they'd help when they had their own needs taken care of, had enough money, enough time. But no one ever thought they had enough. Governments were the worst. They all started out planning to help people, to do good things, but then as soon as they got in power all they wanted was more power, more money, more influence. They turned their backs on their people, and whatever ideals they told themselves they were doing it for. Everyone starts out wanting to do good, but then they get corrupted.

He was no different, of course. He'd done terrible things, unforgivable things, for what he'd once thought of as his ideals.

To be honest, he didn't know what he was doing anymore, or why. He'd had to disappear. That was for sure. Had to stay off the grid. But other than that, he had no direction. They had lied to him. The people he trusted had betrayed him. And he'd betrayed _her. _If he were to be honest to himself, which he was doing for the first time in years, he'd betrayed her first.

He looked at the river, far below the bridge. Lower. What was stopping him? A drunk vagrant falling off a bridge...they probably wouldn't even call it suicide. Doubtful there'd even be an autopsy. No one would claim his body. He'd just be a John Doe, cremated and forgotten, like so many others. Everyone who'd ever known him was either dead, or believed he was.

Some small bird flitted out from beneath a bridge, landed in a tree, then quickly darted back out of the rain.

He leaned over the railing of the bridge, but could go no further. Something stopped him. He didn't know what, but something told him not yet, wait. The world might not be as dark as it seemed right now.

When in the drizzling rain,  
I'm sunk in gloomy thoughts,  
A cuckoo  
Sings in night's depths:  
And where might it be going?

~Ki no Tomonori, Kokinshu 153

The number bothered Harold, as much as he tried to put it from his mind. The CIA, he knew, had strict psychological screenings. Joshua Basil would never have been recruited if he were prone to depression. What had happened to him that made him contemplate suicide?

When he had a few spare minutes and no new numbers, he hacked into the CIA's records.

Basil's height and attractiveness were disadvantages for a spy; far too conspicuous.

Yet spy he was. And a good one, judging by the gushing private emails his superiors shared. His unarmed combat skills had been particularly impressive. At first, his primary duties had been breaking into various high-security facilities around the world. Usually to steal information. More rarely, to steal lives.

In 2001 he'd tendered his resignation. A little digging revealed why. A woman. He'd already bought a rather expensive ring and put a down payment on a house in upstate New York.

He retracted his resignation in September of 2001. It wasn't hard to imagine why. He nearly disappeared after that, lost in a maze of international travel and name changes, with only the CIA's files to keep track of him. The most common alias he used during this time was John Reese.

He was an assassin. A good one. The people he was sent to kill were for the most part obviously evil: drug lords, warlords, war criminals, terrorists. The kind of people most decent human beings wished someone would take out. But over time, the rationales for the killings became less and less obvious.

And then something changed.

In February of 2011, two Americans, Peter Williams and his wife Jessica, had been taken hostage by a drug gang while vacationing in Mexico. They had been kept for over two weeks before being executed.

The wife, nee Jessica Arndt, was the same woman John Reese had been in a hotel room with on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

The government had known about the Williams' kidnapping, as well as Reese's past connection to Mrs. Williams. Harold uncovered a series of communications between a man named Mark Snow and Reese's handler, Stanton, concerning what to do about the situation. Stanton was adamant that Reese could not find out.

The day after the kidnapping, John Reese had been sent on a completely pointless mission deep in the mountains of Afghanistan. Ostensibly he was looking for a local tribal leader, a man he later learned didn't exist. By the time he was allowed to return to civilization, Jessica was dead.

The next time he was in the States, Reese tried to check up on Jessica, as he often did, less discreetly than he supposed, and that's when he learned the truth.

Less than a month later, while on a mission to dissolve a terrorist-affiliated smuggling ring in Ossetia, there was an explosion. The body of Reese's handler was recovered. Reese himself was presumed dead, as there seemed to be no way he could have escaped the building in time.

The CIA's covert investigation discovered the explosives used were of a kind and design Reese had been trained to use. It was as if he'd signed his name to it. Unofficially, it was considered a murder-suicide.

Harold was beginning to understand what haunted this man.

Are you, too, O cuckoo,  
A wanderer from home  
And longing for your mate—  
You, who in the Kamunabi Mountains  
Cry far into the night?

~Anonymous, Manyoshu 1938

Sometimes he passed the apartment building where she had lived when he first met her. Jessica had always seemed so bright, and fresh, and alive, like a garden after a rain. It still didn't seem real that she was dead. Part of him still couldn't believe it.

After faking his death with the explosion that killed Stanton, he could have gone anywhere. He could easily have become a mercenary in the war-torn third-world country of his choice, or lived as a hermit in the wilderness, surviving off the land, or even used his connections to get some fake I.D.s and start a new life. But instead he'd come back here, to New York City, where he could torture himself with reminders of his mistakes every day.

He looked at the apartment building for just a minute before moving on. He couldn't stand that she was dead. That she, as vibrant and full of happiness as she'd been, was gone, and such a vile and sad creature as himself was still here.

Go tell her this, O cuckoo: the orange blossoms  
Where once she lived are now their loveliest.

~Murasaki Shikibu, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker

In the ensuing weeks, Harold went again and again to the man he was beginning to think of as John Reese. He learned absolutely everything there was to know about him, both professional and personal. Reese was mission-driven and guilt-ridden. He didn't want to go on living, but wanted his death to mean something. Which was, Harold determined, why he hadn't yet fallen prey to the danger the Machine had predicted for him.

Harold kept coming back to the thought that Reese could be very valuable: someone with the skills and training to help him with the numbers, someone he could trust with the truth for the simple fact that he didn't have anyone else to divulge the secret to. He would welcome the chance to save lives instead of take them. And, most importantly, he would not try to use the Machine to his serve his own purposes, as he had no purposes of his own to serve.

On the other hand, if he proved wrong in his assessment, trusting John Reese could prove to be the biggest mistake of his life. And if the existence of the Machine became public knowledge, the ramifications would go far beyond his own life.

But in a deep recess of Harold's mind, there was something else: the observation that this man, like himself, had lost someone he loved. Someone he could have saved. Maybe, just maybe, having someone who felt the same pain would make it easier to bear.

Oh, cuckoo,  
You are not me, yet  
Drooping as a faded flower  
In this cruel world of men  
You cry on.

~Oshikochi no Mitsune, Kokinshu 164

A flock of pigeons taking flight from the sound of a passing garbage truck awoke him. He'd fallen asleep with his back against the wall of a blind alley, an empty liquor bottle in his hand. He clutched it like a child might a teddy bear.

Stumbling to his feet, he tossed the empty bottle in a garbage and wandered out of the alley. It was barely dawn, and there were few people on the street. None of them looked at him.

He was glad of that. He didn't want the world to see him.

There was a fountain outside a mall. He sat beside it, pulled up his sleeve, and started picking out the change people had thrown in.

Then he looked up. The mall wouldn't open for another hour, and there was no one around, but for a moment he'd gotten the strange sensation that he was being watched.

A cuckoo calls.  
When I look there is only  
The waning moon  
In the early dawn.

~Fujiwara no Sanesada, Hyakunin Isshu 81

Harold did have a few indulgences: rare books, birdwatching, and the occasional visit to his favorite teashop.

It was a small, quiet place on Staten Island, a tiny space at the side of a neighborhood convenience store. The window was hidden behind a curtain of live bamboo, giving a green tint to the light inside. The teashop was called Sado Chado, and was run by a woman named Tamako. It was a quiet space, often empty, and Harold had never seen more than five people in it. There was only one large table. All guests would sit there as Tamako served tea and polite conversation. There was a paper banner on the wall painted with four kanji characters that Tamako had explained spelled _ichigo ichie_: one moment, one meeting. The saying meant to treasure each moment as you lived it, since it would never come again.

There was no one else in the tea house today.

"Ohayo gozaimasu, Harold-san," the hostess greeted him.

"Ohayo gozaimasu, Tamako-san," he replied.

He accepted the seat she offered him. A minute later, a tray of wagashi was set on the table. Tamako poured hot water into two teacups and stirred in the matcha. "How are you today?" she inquired, making it sound like a sincere inquiry rather than conversational pleasantry.

"I'm well. How are you?"

"I had a strange dream and woke up sad this morning, but the day is very sunny, which has improved my mood. How is your business, Harold-san?"

"It's going well." There was a slight hesitation in his answer.

Tamako smiled gently. "But something is troubling you."

They both took a sip of tea before Harold decided how he would respond. "There's a...project I've been working on. It's a complicated and difficult enterprise, but if it goes well it could be very profitable. The problem is, it's not something I can do on my own. I recently learned of someone who has the required skills to help me with it, but I'm not sure if I should ask for his help."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not sure he would want to help me, and getting into business with him may prove risky."

"How would it be risky?"

"The man in question, I don't know him personally, and I've heard he can be unpredictable. The business is very delicate, and entrusting it to someone of questionable character could ruin me."

Tamako nodded. They enjoyed their tea in silence for a moment before she said, "But it sounds like the project is very important to you, or you wouldn't be bothered so much that the person who could be your partner isn't suitable."

"I'm not sure he wouldn't be suitable. And right now he's in a tight situation that would be helped if he agreed to go into business with me, but he may not accept my offer. And whether he accepts or not, he could be damaging to my business."

Silence fell over the room again, and Harold looked at the glowing green bamboo outside the window.

"There is a saying in Japan," Tamako said, "that even a hunter cannot kill a bird who flies to him for shelter. It seems to me that if you ask this man to help you, he would at the very least not turn it to your harm."

Harold fell into a thoughtful silence. When a minute had passed without him speaking, Tamako asked him what books he had read recently, which is what they discussed for the rest of Harold's time there.

A cuckoo calls  
And through the great bamboo grove  
I see the moon.

~Basho, trans. Jonathan Clements

He continued to watch John Reese, learning more about him, not just about his past but about his habits. He still had not decided if he should contact him when something happened that forced him to a decision: Mr. Reese had been brought in by police after an altercation with a group of young punks on the subway. Harold knew his fingerprints would be flagged. He knew he had to act fast.

Harold trusted lawyers more than most people. Lawyers had a code of ethics they could not violate without losing their jobs, and a legal protection no other profession was afforded. Thus it was that Harold sent a lawyer to retrieve Mr. Reese before the police figured out what they had.

He'd given a lot of thought to what he would tell Reese when they met. He had realized Reese wouldn't be content to being on a need-to-know basis, not with his past, but Harold wasn't about to tell him everything. His name, for example. He hadn't told anyone his real name in decades, and he tried to have a new one for each new venture he began. He had to choose a new name. It had to be something common, but something he would like, since if this person of interest accepted the job it was a name he may need to get used to responding to.

John Reese was escorted toward the breezy patch of park near the river where Harold was waiting. Birds were singing in the surrounding trees. Harold listened, letting the bird songs calm his nerves. He could identify the songs of chickadees, sparrows, finches...

That was it.

"You can call me Mr. Finch. I think you and I can help one another."

Harold would later wonder if his job offer to Mr. Reese was motivated more by his own need for help with the numbers or his desire to save him. In spite of knowing everything there was to know about John Reese's past, there were some things that surprised him. He hadn't expected the softness of his voice, the brightness of his smile. He hadn't known that the traumas Reese had suffered would not manifest in bitterness or despair, that his wit and charm would surface instantly, that a haircut and a new suit would erase all traces of the homeless ex-assassin desperate for oblivion.

And he never would have guessed that in saving John Reese, Harold Finch was also saving himself.

A cuckoo  
Gave a single call and  
Went away this night:  
How can one then  
Simply sleep?

~Otomo no Yakamochi, Shinkokinshu 195


End file.
